Chestnut Mushroom and Chickpea Burgers

This is my first day off from work since last Monday, which may not sound very absurd to those of you who have worked full-time for years, but I’m really not used to it. I didn’t work a single day whilst at university, which means for the best part of 3 years I’ve had only to concentrate on studies and music – thank God I’m working expressly to go back to university and do a Master’s degree. As such, I can’t really complain – I need just about as much money as I can happily earn. However, it does mean that blogging regularly can be a little difficult, hence the lack of new post over the past few days.

A day off has, however, allowed me to get back to creating slightly inventive lunches. These burgers or patties – whatever you want to call them – really are incredibly delicious, far better than I thought they would be. They also happened to be exceedingly frugal and frightfully healthy. Actually, on the flavour side of things I do have one piece of advice: use chestnut mushrooms. They have such an amazing, intense, nutty flavour that normal white or button mushrooms simply don’t possess. Cost wise they are slightly more expensive, but at only 10 pence more expensive per 100g I’m sure we’ll live with that.

These burgers have also reaffirmed my love for simple vegetarian food. Someone I know recently made the point that cuisine that is sans meat requires a little extra care and attention to ensure that it has a complete body of flavour. While I know this isn’t always the case and that it is a bit of a generalisation, it remains a good point and is one of the reasons behind my enjoyment of vegetarian cooking.

Chestnut Mushroom and Chickpea Burgers

Makes 4 burgers

Ingredients:

• 250g chestnut mushrooms, finely chopped

• 400g can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

• 2 large cloves of garlic, mashed

• ½ tsp ground cumin

• ½ tsp ground coriander

• ¼ tsp ground turmeric

• ½ tsp chilli flakes

• Large handful of breadcrumbs, 80-100g

• Small bunch of fresh coriander, finely chopped

• Seasoning

• Olive oil

Method:

1. Fry the garlic and spices off quickly in some hot oil. Add the mushrooms and cook until almost dry. Expect lots of water to be released from the mushrooms.

2. Mash the chickpeas with a fork leaving them with a little texture, a quick turn in the food processor would have the same effect.

3. Mix together the mushrooms, chickpeas, breadcrumbs and coriander, season well and shape into 4 burgers. Fry in olive oil until golden brown on each side. Serve in a bun or in a wrap with some salad and a sauce of your choice. They would also be delicious with a squeeze of lemon or lime.

Cost: The ingredients which were used to create these four burgers came to around £1.70. Considering that I’d quite happily eat one of these instead of a beef burger, and perhaps even prefer to do so, that’s a pretty damn goof price!

109 comments on “Chestnut Mushroom and Chickpea Burgers”

Looks delicious, almost falafel and is probably good with a garlic yogurt sauce. I’ll have to give this a try as I have a large can of chick peas in my cabinet. I thought that you might have added chestnuts rather than chestnut mushrooms to this burger, that’s an interesting idea as well.

Hmm… Here in the Netherlands fresh chestnut mushrooms cost several times more than fresh chestnuts, even without taking into the account the fact that mushrooms shrivel a lot while cooking while chestnuts don’t (even if you have to discard the shells). Though of course you’d spend more time peeling the chestnuts, but it would still be way cheaper.

(Even if you used vacuum-packed chestnuts it would still be cheaper, considering that the mushrooms lose most of their weight when frying while the chestnuts don’t lose anything.)

Well… they are vastly different ingredients. Chestnut mushrooms are probably only called that because of their colour. A far more suitable replacement would be an average mushroom, or whatever is fairly cheap to buy there… the recipe is very tasty 😀

I wasn’t talking about “replacements”, I was referring to your comment “I guess chestnuts would taste nice in this, but chestnut mushrooms are to die for. Also, chestnuts would have added cost.”, noting that using chestnuts instead of chestnut mushrooms wouldn’t have added to the cost (at least here), but quite the opposite. Of course the result would be very different, since they are two entirely different things. Both would likely be delicious. Sadly it’s not something I can try.

Oh that’s good – when I saw the post title come up in my email reader, I thought..”bugger, chestnuts, they’re not cheap here..”. 🙂 Neither are chestnut mushrooms, but I do have a stack of exotic mushies that I bought quite reasonably priced at the markets last week, and there’s always chick peas at our house.

Did you know that you can buy dried chickpeas, soak them, and then freeze them. So anytime you need chickpeas, they can be boiled from frozen without needing to soak them again! A lovely older Lebanese lady taught me that trick.. 🙂

I’m always cautious of veggie burgers being a hard core carnie but these look and sound delicious! I think I may give them a try later on this month. Once I do, I’ll send you the post and we can compare. Cheers! H

Am not a veggie but really enjoy meat free food – expecially as we grow so many of our own vegetables. We have a good local grower of chickpeas and in a month or so should have a good supply of oyster mushrooms, so will be giving these a go!

These look and sound awesome! I wonder where I can pick up some chestnut mushrooms…or maybe I’ll experiment with some baby portobellas. When it comes to vegetarian cuisine, burgers are always a success!

Great post. I was veggie for almost nine years, but now I’m a fully fledged meat eater I often find it hard to remember what I used to make to get me excited about vegetarian food. These look delicious – reckon I could even pass them off on my carniverous boyfriend which is high praise indeed 🙂

“They also happened to be exceedingly frugal and frightfully healthy.” – loved this line! 😉 I have yet to make a veggie patty, but the addition of mushrooms is unique – most I have seen are made with black beans. These sound and look wonderful 🙂

Great recipe! Great photography too! What kind of camera did you use? Did you use a macro lens too? I’m a classically trained chef with over 20 years of experience and I’ve got to say that I truly love both your recipe and your photography work (my Dad was a professional photographer, so I know a little about that too 🙂 Awesome post….

ok just read that it is chestnut mushrooms! woops! well I love mushrooms so they still sound absolutely yummy to me and I am in the process of cooking up some chickpeas so I think I will make these soon. Although I have never heard of chestnut mushrooms either 🙂 so I will have to see if I can find some!

Wow – these look great. This is very similar in ingredients to a chickpea burger I make(carrot, celery, chickpea, breadcrumbs, egg, seasonings.)The chickpeas are cooked, but everything else is raw. I like the texture look of yours and they seem to have held together very well. Mine tend to fall apart.Adding the fresh coriander (cilantro where I come from) sounds wonderful. I will definitely adapt mine more now that I have seen another recipe. I take a whole bag of chick peas and cook them up and freeze them in the amounts needed for things like my burger, just another step to save a few more cents for me. I do the same with black beans. Emily

Sounds lovely! It helps if you refrigerate them first if you find them falling apart. I thought adding coriander would add a little freshness and colour. I’m kind of lazy, so I prefer using tinned chick peas – still extremely cheap! Glad you liked my recipe 😀

First, this looks totally amazing. Surprisingly, I have NEVER tried to make a vegan burger. When I went into the grocery store to ask for “fresh coriander” they showed me the cilantro. Funny, I never knew that in the US we call it cilantro when it is fresh and coriander when it is dry!

For the US readers who are confused about the chestnut mushrooms, it’s because we don’t have them here. IF you can find them, they are called “Black Poplar”
The closest readily available equivalents would be Crimini or Portabello mushrooms, although any flavorful brown mushroom would probably be an acceptable substitute.

This looks like an excellent recipe and I’m excited to try it. We do burgers and patties a lot for quick lunches and these sound like they would fit right in. Do you refrigerate your extras? Or can you freeze them before cooking and use them later?
I tend to make things in bigger batches than I need, to make it easier later.

Ok, these look fantastic and since I am tiptoeing towards veganism, I am going to give them a try. Thanks for visiting my blog and thanks for a great looking recipe. By the way you take awesome pictures.

Just wanted to let you know I tried this recipe today and it came out delicious. The only thing i did differently was adding onion and baking the burgers instead of frying them.
This is now one of my favorite recipes… thanks so much !